I recently finished reading Sebastián Martínez Daniell’s novel, Two Sherpas, translated by Jennifer Croft and published by Charco Press. The premise has high stakes—two Sherpas guiding an Englishman on an ascent in Nepal must decide what to do after the man falls to a lower ridge.
Two Sherpas is a novel suspended in an emergency. A man has fallen; two men observe him. At the same time, it’s a book that moves through time. The narrative leaps between present and past, revealing personal and historical details. We see vignettes from the life of each Sherpa, one older, the other younger. We get glimpses of their pasts, insight as to what brought them to the mountain. These unveilings are punctuated by the Sherpas assessing the urgent situation: Is the Englishman moving? What can/should they do? Should one seek help, while the other remains behind?
The novel also paints in broader historical strokes that explore early expeditions to scale Mount Everest, Sherpa people, exploitive tourism, a retelling of Julius Caesar. So it’s a book about individual lives—private circumstances, dreams, bonds, and longing—and the way those lives fold into colonialism, empire, discovery, and ambition. All set against the backdrop of this botched ascent of a mountain.
The stakes don’t get lost in the time hopping and wandering threads. If anything, they feel intensified with each new diversion; each new element carries us away from the urgency, at the same time that it contextualizes the dire moment.
Something else that sticks with me is a refrain meditating on silence that appears throughout the novel. Early in the book, just after the accident, the old Sherpa addresses the younger: “And so he breaks the silence. If the deafening noise of the wind ravelling over the ridges of the Himalayas can be considered silence.” As the story moves, variations of this sentence appear. The repetition lends itself to existential reeling (“does true silence exist?”) and raises questions about responsibility. My understanding of this phrase changed each time I encountered it: silence is complex; there’s no such thing as silence; what replaces an absence of sound, or in the case of the Sherpas looking down at the fallen Englishman on the ridge below, the absence of action? So the repeated phrase is a testimony to nature’s cruel indifference—imagine the Himalayas caring what happens to any of us—but its accumulation has the effect of bold-facing the contract we unknowingly undertake with other humans when we enter this world. What role do we take up in chaos? What contexts—personal and historical—underlie our present circumstances and inform the choices we make?
A structural element I loved about this book was the titling and numbering of chapters. I was about to type “I’ve never seen this done before…” but I just pulled Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever (not a comp at all, just what I reached for) off my shelf and confirmed that book does this as well: some chapters are titled and some are numbered. I have yet to unravel the organizing principle behind the inconsistent naming, but I like it because usually we see one or the other—I’m 95% sure workshop wisdom would be like, “Be consistent. Pick one”…but I think workshop wisdom can be overrated and the second everyone starts following every rule is the second books get boring.
Two Sherpas is kaleidoscopic in its attention, yet focused in each reorientation. It’s a book filled with quiet intensity and startling beauty, moving in many directions yet refusing to lose the reader to its ambition. A story that ripples out from its premise of a moment, urging a reader forward with its sweeping epic scope and howling winds.
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